Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Obama = Bush 2.0, the Book

I am currently working on my first book, which is an expanded and comprehensive look at the many striking similarities between the Obama Administration and the Bush Administration it was elected to replace.

As it turns out, all of the biggest reasons for disliking Mr. Obama are the very same reasons Americans so strongly disapproved of George W. Bush at the time of his departure earlier this year.

Or to put it conversely, if you disliked George W. Bush and you take an honest inventory of the facts, you should dislike Obama's Administration too- maybe even more.

I plan to be done with my first draft of the book soon and sending queries to publishers shortly thereafter. In the meantime, here's a sneak peek at an excerpt from a rough version of my introductory chapter:

"It's too early to say" and other objections:

When I set out to write this book and started to share its ideas and content with others, I hit a lot of resistance from people who said "It's way too early to say anything about the Obama Administration. He's only been President for x months. You can't blame him for not fixing everything overnight. He inherited a huge mess of things from the Bush Administration. Rome wasn't built in a day, you know."

So allow me to begin by clarifying exactly why this is not the case and why this line of argumentation is predicated on a fundamental misconception of my entire thesis. It is not that Mr. Obama hasn't done enough to clean up "Mr. Bush's mess" in the last few months. My quarrel with Obama is that he has in fact done so much, so very radically much in such a short time, that not only continues all of the worst aspects of the Bush Administration, but in many cases does so at an accelerated rate, dwarfing by comparison the damage inflicted to our republic during the presidency of George W. Bush.

To use an analogy: Imagine that America is a house and for eight days, George W. Bush threw a wild and reckless party, trashing the entire property. If after one day of picking up litter and mopping away refuse, Barack Obama had a lot of straightening up left to do to make the house presentable again, he could be forgiven. A criticism of him would be unfair and premature, but throughout the rest of this book, you'll see how this is not the case.

In fact, what has happened is that the house's new resident has thrown an even wilder, more reckless party and trashed the place in much the same way its previous resident had- and astonishingly, has managed to do a comparable amount of "trashing" in a relatively much shorter period of time. In the end, I am not criticizing President Obama for "not doing enough good" in such a short period of time, but for somehow managing to "do so much bad" in a remarkably brief space. Thus, it is not too early to write this book. Instead, the sheer volume of criticisms I will be able to set forth so early on in Mr. Obama's Administration should be a further indictment against him.

5 comments:

If you thesis is correct, and I have posted on the same subject a few weeks ago so you will not hear any arguments from me...

Then the reality is, in light of the fact that Bush and Obama started from totally opposite sides of our political spectrum, that our issue is not really our political system...

If you can elect two people from two totally opposite sides of the political spectrum and once in office they both appear to become one and the same, then obviously your political system is a subsystem, a secondary process, inside a much larger and or more dominant system...

So, if it is change that one desires it should be obvious to everyone NOW, that the change will have to occur in this system rather than in the political system...

It is too early to say.......Stop writing your book - it is liberal crap.Anyone who is still blame Pres. Bush after 4 million jobs lost since January 20th can't see the forest through the trees. Did you also attend Harvard Community College? They can't and won't seek truth.

TAO- I think you have a good point, that while Bush and Obama may appear to be on opposite sides of our party system, they are on the same side of a bigger question- the question of the role of government.

Hans- I think TAO would agree with you. Thanks for that PPT. I'll be looking at it soon.

Left Coast Rebel- Thanks!

Michael- Isn't it fair to criticize both Obama and Bush? If you mean that my book is "liberal" in the contemporary, American sense of that word as I suspect you do, then I must disagree strongly.

My criticism of Bush is in fact that he's way too "liberal" in that same sense of the word, not nearly "conservative" enough for me.